It’s been happening to me a lot this morning.
I wonder what exactly happens on line 31.
31 Do function InjectCecilwithAmphetamine;
IF (users > max) {display(cryptic_message)};
[Edited by TubaDiva on 07-05-2000 at 10:30 AM]
It has been very bad today. I’ve also seen this message:
Sorry about that. Thanks Tuba.
It’s been crawling today…I’m getting this message about every other time I try to access a forum. Posting is maddeningly s-l-o-w. Is it the board, then?
I’m having trouble getting in to the threads with the gray folders. Yaaargh. I got that “too many connections” thing too, and I didn’t get on the board until after 5 pm today.
Yep , me too . Seems to be better now but thats probably coz a lot of people just gave up and went out into the real world .
The real WHAT? What are you talking about? Am I missing something?
Since the upgrade to version 1.1.3 of vBulletin there has been a definite decrease in performance. I certainly can understand a small decrease, say 5% or so, because with new features come new demands on the system for resources.
It was pretty apparent that right after the upgrade the instances of “too many connections” had risen dramatically. When I look at a graph of the throughput on our T-1 there are wild swings in very small periods of time. You’ve probably experienced this yourself where you can access the board fine for 1 minute and then the next minute…forget it. Atleast that’s been my experience so far.
Throughput in general is off by about 50% and there is no doubt the server is working much much harder then when we were running version 1.1.0. The obvious conclusion is that something dramatic has occured with the newer version of vBulletin. I know…I know…I’m a genius!
Over the next few days, as I have some time available from my other responsibilities, I will look into reconfiguring the parameters of the web server in hopes of increasing the throughput or atleast getting the throughput to be consistent. I can’t promise any immediate improvements, or any improvements actually, but I’m aware of the problem and will be looking for a resolution.
As always, your patience is appreciated. Think of this as a chance to increase your productivity in other areas of your life! g
This board continues to suffer from its own popularity.
I’ve made some parameter changes to vBulletin in hopes of increasing performance and reducing the “too many connections” issue which has been with us since the software upgrade on Monday. I’d appreciate people reporting whether or not they’ve seen a decrease in the “too many connections” warning message from Thursday, July 6th at 5:00 PM CDT going forward.
Probably will have a better sense by tomorrow afternoon if anything has improved. The evening hours are not as busy so we won’t really know until the business day tomorrow is over.
Well, it’s 11:00 A.M. in New York and the board is slower than Karo Syrup in January.
I’ve had two popular posters privately E-mail me that they were fed up and were probably going to leave, so I do hope this is remedied doon . . .
Got off the phone with Jerry a little while ago. What he did was increase the limit on simultaneous users from 100 to 200, while decreasing the timeout from 20 minutes to 30 seconds. This means you don’t get the “too many users” message any more, you get the timeout message instead. The reason he decreased the timeout is that if the system is overloaded, the server aborts the slow connections rather than have them tie up resources.
The underlying problem is that something in the most recent vB upgrade is causing the server to work a lot harder–as Jerry said, decreasing throughput by 50%. Jerry has to keep all the systems in the whole company running and doesn’t have time to do the necessary detective work. We’re monitoring the vB message board at http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/index.php to see if anyone else comes up with a fix. If the Teeming Millions want to help, hey, this is your big chance. We are hoping there is some processor-intensive function we can switch off, or disable with a simple hack. The obvious candidate is something having to do with the “last post” (blue arrow) function. If anyone has any ideas, please post them here. Do NOT e-mail Jerry; he’s got his hands full already. Thanks.
Today (July 10) the board has been horrifically slow for me all day, and I’ve gotten the error message referenced by mattk above a few times today.
(That’s a new one for me. I used to only get the ‘Line 31’ error message.)
I’m getting the “mattk” error as well. This is ridiculous. Next question for Mr. Adams. Why is your board so slow?
Disclaimer: I am not an administrator at the Straight Dope, so the statements below should not be construed as representing the official position of the Straight Dope Message Board management.
winky99, I believe that the root cause for the slowness of the board can be explained by using one keyboard character: $.
The Straight Dope Message Board is offered as a free service and does not generate revenue to Cecil Adams, The Straight Dope®, and/or the Chicago Reader. Improvements to the SDMB would require an outlay of capital that would be difficult to justify to a for-profit organization.
The software (vBulletin) used to manage the straight dope message board is most often used for message boards that have much less traffic than the SDMB. To use the old cliché, the board is a victim of its own success.
In the past the technical support staff of the Chicago Reader has been able to do miracles to keep the SDMB up and running. However, making it as fast as lightning is another matter.
Arnold I hope I didn’t present myself as being pissed or ungreatful. I and I’m sure a majority of the Teeming Millions appreciate all the mods and admins for presenting and managing this forum for discussion.
The vBulletin upgrade has obviously affected performance and it can be a little frustrating. Hopefully vBulletin will be able to post a fix, until then, we’ll suck it up. Who knows, maybe this is a good way to clean out some of the more annoying posters. You know who you are.
Now, I wonder how long it will take for this post to go through . . . 
I come to the conclusion that obviously even the folks at vBulletin were not aware that their new version would be such a drag on performance, 'cause they have an inadequate testing environment.
Now, I went looking at the other sites I could find that use vBulletin to see what sort of traffic they command. Seems like SDMB is a pretty good testing environment, albeit an unintentional one, because it’s probably their most demanding customer.
Given the financial situation, I was wondering if a deal could be worked out with vBulletin that as long as SDMB is such a prime guinea pig for their “improvements”, perhaps they could offer some additional free support? After all they ARE getting something for it: the right to claim that their product will work well even under high-traffic conditions.
Having worked for software companies, I know that the free-support for free-endorsement deal is not uncommon.
Just thought I’d suggest an avenue to explore…
A majority? I believe it’s every single one of them! As a matter of fact, if I close my eyes, I can picture in my mind the gratitude just oozing from their pores.
ren, your suggestion may have some merit.
Arnold said:
This is the same thing we used to hear about UBB. I had thought one of the reasons for the switch was the promise of smoother-running, more capable software. Of course, we expect random bugs, and have already suffered through some for the sake of VBulletin, but it seems to me the product is not living up to expectations. Note: this is not intended as a slam to the administrators of this board, who I’ll agree have been doing their best. I just think the folks at VBulletin have some issues to address.